I know that most of you here are probably using the Roadgeek 2005 fonts, which were made by a self-proclaimed road geek. But those are unofficial. My question is, is there actually a definitive set of the FHWA Series fonts that is actually approved for use on real highway signs? I've come across this, for example. (http://fhwa.org/en/products/fhwa/fhwa_2000ex_en.html) But I myself use the Saa series of fonts, which appear to be a carbon copy of Roadgeek/FHWA 2000 but also includes the long discontinued Series A. (And I've read that Saa is used on license plates.)
I know that the FHWA Series are not copyrightable being a work of the US govt, so is any copy of the fonts acceptable for use on real signs?
Considering the number of atrocious fonts I've seen on signs, I would think the Roadgeek fonts would do just fine. ;-)
But, are those fonts actually used on real signs? Because even though I've seen the MUTCD, it never seems to include the actual fonts for use, making me think that any set of FHWA-like fonts are fine so long as they are more or less compliant with the guidelines.
I believe there is an "official" set of fonts that the DOTs use for creating signs, but it is only marginally better (i.e. you pretty much have to zoom in 4000x to see a difference) than the Roadgeek fonts. Michael Adams did an outstanding job on them. As far as I know, the "official" fonts are not freely available on the Web.
The official Clearview fonts cost on the order of $700 per typeface, I believe.
Quote from: Scott5114 on September 06, 2010, 08:51:44 PM
I believe there is an "official" set of fonts that the DOTs use for creating signs, but it is only marginally better (i.e. you pretty much have to zoom in 4000x to see a difference) than the Roadgeek fonts. Michael Adams did an outstanding job on them. As far as I know, the "official" fonts are not freely available on the Web.
The official Clearview fonts cost on the order of $700 per typeface, I believe.
$800 for the entire set, all 13 weights.
...
Perhaps others can key in here, but I recall US copyright doesn't actually extend to typefaces. (source: http://nwalsh.com/comp.fonts/FAQ/cf_13.htm ) You can (in theory) easily trace and copy fonts and not have to worry about it. The whole Clearview costing $800 and requiring a license is BS to begin with. Being that its used for public sector projects, it should be in the public domain like the FHWA series fonts are.
Then why do some sites charge for the FHWA series fonts? Just because they do the tracing for you?
You can copyright a font file. You cannot copyright the actual typeface design. This is why you can often find cheap knockoffs of respectable fonts under another name (see Chancery Cursive/Zapf Chancery/URW Chancery L/Monotype Corsiva/whatever)
Quote from: Quillz on September 06, 2010, 09:47:10 PMThen why do some sites charge for the FHWA series fonts? Just because they do the tracing for you?
Erm, no. The vendors of the "pay" versions are selling more than just tracing services. They are also selling economy in use of curve nodes in the glyphs, which is helpful with sign-cutting equipment, as well as kerning in accordance with published standards either through the use of letter tiles with the correct widths and character offsets or through kerning pairs. In the case of the FHWA alphabet series, fonts tend to be cheap because dimensioned drawings for the glyphs for all of the alphabet series, including Series A but excluding Series E Modified/Lowercase, have been around since 1945, along with published spacing tables. You can therefore draw the letters from scratch (without having to trace them) and you can also program the kerning pairs yourself.
The Clearview fonts are expensive even though the typefaces themselves are in the public domain, which was a condition of FHWA granting interim approval for the use of Clearview. The designers of Clearview have been very canny by refraining from publishing dimensioned drawings of the Clearview glyphs and also by providing images of the glyphs themselves only as low-resolution rasters in the Clearview type supplement which you can download from the FHWA
MUTCD site. This means that potential competitors wishing to produce their own Clearview fonts are stuck trying to reverse-engineer vector drawings which use the Clearview fonts, which puts them at risk of civil damages or criminal prosecution for copyright infringement, or cleaning up all the spurious nodes which result from a trace job on low-resolution rasters. The Clearview designers have put the typefaces in the public domain, but that does not oblige them to facilitate duplication by others. By charging $800 for the fonts they are essentially milking a first-mover advantage.
The Roadgeek fonts are quite close to the real typefaces and are excellent for producing sign drawings which are presented as low-resolution rasters on this website. However, they have certain limitations. Because the Roadgeek Clearview fonts were produced from the Clearview typeface supplement, the glyphs have all kinds of kinks and bends which are visible at high zoom. The Roadgeek FHWA Series fonts do not suffer from this problem (Michael Adams has always said he produced them by dumping the
SHS typeface drawings to raster at very high resolution and then autotracing the results, but as far as I can tell he might as well have copied the drawings directly), but I suspect the kerning of being wrong to some degree for all of the alphabet series other than Series E Modified.
Quote from: Scott5114 on September 06, 2010, 08:51:44 PMI believe there is an "official" set of fonts that the DOTs use for creating signs, but it is only marginally better (i.e. you pretty much have to zoom in 4000x to see a difference) than the Roadgeek fonts. Michael Adams did an outstanding job on them. As far as I know, the "official" fonts are not freely available on the Web.
My understanding is that
MUTCD art is produced in
CorelDRAW (which I also use, though probably not in the same version) using URW America's FHWA series fonts. However, preparing art for the
MUTCD is not the same as cutting signs to be installed in the field. For the latter I suspect the fonts come with sign cutting software, which may in turn be linked to the sign design package used by the state DOT/consultant/sign shop. Vendors like SignCAD have software offerings which support integrated sign design and manufacturing--you can draw the sign in
SignCAD, for example, and then feed the result into SignCAD's sign-cutting product.
I suspect a lot of vendors of sign design software of deliberately distorting some glyphs as a defense against unintelligent copyright infringement. For example, the "S" in Series D in
SignCAD looks like a squashed fruit. Pixymbols also has a version of the FHWA alphabet series where the "5" in Series E Modified is wrong, wrong, wrong but happens to match the frame outline of "5" as produced by a major button-copy manufacturer (Stimsonite?). In contradistinction, the Roadgeek series shoot straight where glyphs are concerned.
I guess as a follow up to this, I actually called up the FHWA.org website today to see if they would actually sell to individuals, and they told me they don't. They redirected me to the CA reseller and was told, after some initial confusion, that I can only buy that complete font package if I'm affiliated with some kind of government. I don't know why this would be the case, being that I specifically told them I was using the fonts only for personal reasons, not to fabricate signs or something.
In the end, I'll probably just try these "Roadgeek" fonts. I am currently using Saa, which I incorrectly stated to be a copy of the FHWA Series. It's actually supposed to be a copy of license plate fonts, which are extremely similar, but not nearly the same. I've noted that Series B, for example, looks quite different with certain numerals.
EDIT: It was also noted earlier that the kerning for all series other than E(M) might be wrong, but can't kerning be adjusted manually in any editing software, such as Illustrator? I've always been able to adjust it, so wouldn't one just match it to some official specifications?
Quote from: Quillz on November 29, 2010, 04:34:12 PMEDIT: It was also noted earlier that the kerning for all series other than E(M) might be wrong, but can't kerning be adjusted manually in any editing software, such as Illustrator? I've always been able to adjust it, so wouldn't one just match it to some official specifications?
I said earlier on that the kerning in the Roadgeek series other than E Modified was so tight as to be possibly incorrect, but I later compared the tile widths in Roadgeek Series D with those specified in the 2004
SHS book, and found the match to be close if not exact. For this reason I now think the Roadgeek series are more or less on spec. I think it is possible FHWA adopted closer intercharacter spacing for the FHWA alphabet series in the 2004
SHS, but I have not attempted to verify this by performing a comparison of the 2004
SHS tables with those given in the last (paper) edition of
Standard Alphabets for Highway Signs.
I have the official Dutch versions of the series E(M), D and C, which are called RWS-Ee, Dd and Cc.
However they do have some visible differences to the American original.
(https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.autosnelwegen.nl%2Fasw%2Fforum2%2FDd1.jpg&hash=0fb71025ef291a2ec570ca9bb8888226cf619897)
I like the thin-stroke C. I swear I've seen it in Kentucky.
Can you email me that font please? jake@aaroads.com
Quote from: aswnl on December 16, 2010, 05:50:11 PM
I have the official Dutch versions of the series E(M), D and C, which are called RWS-Ee, Dd and Cc.
However they do have some visible differences to the American original.
(https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.autosnelwegen.nl%2Fasw%2Fforum2%2FDd1.jpg&hash=0fb71025ef291a2ec570ca9bb8888226cf619897)
Would you mind e-mailing me a copy of these fonts? (jmostarda@aol.com) I'd like to compare it to both the Roadgeek and Saa fonts that I already have.
Regarding the Clearview fonts and the errors the unofficial fonts contain wouldn't an easy way of getting accurate shaped characters be to go up to a sign and take pictures of each letter?
Perhaps. I do have the "official" ClearviewHwy fonts, though, if anyone wants a copy. It cost money but apparently fonts in the US can't be copyrighted, so I don't have any issues sharing it with anyone who wants it.
the font itself cannot be copyrighted, but the exact binary implementation can.
if you have a font description (radii and lengths or whatnot) then you can code it up yourself, make a TTF file, and copyright that.
it's a pretty absurd law, but if laws weren't absurd, lawyers would go out of business, and we can't have that.
Yes, I think that's what ClearviewHwy is: It's already been optimized for sign usage by having default kerning, tracking, etc. values. From what I've read elsewhere, the font characters in of themselves are not copyrightable, but the whole typeface collection is because of some of the optimization work that was done on it.
Thanks for sending the font samples that you did. But I'm curious... Are the Ccx and Ddx fonts intended to be roughly equivalent to a C(M) and D(M)? Because I did find that both were slightly thicker than just Cc and Dd.
Ee and Cc are meant for use as white characters on a darker (blue/green) background.
Eex and Ccx are designed for use as black characters on a light (white/yellow) background (for better legibility).
Oh, okay, so then it's roughly equivalent to the Clearview -B and -W typefaces. Thanks for the info.
Just to elaborate on what's been said above. There is a difference, typographically speaking, between a font and a typeface. Times would be a typeface. Times Roman 12 point is a font, as a font specifies style (Roman vs. bold or italics) and a size of a particular typeface.
Under US copyright law, a font file on your computer though is considered software and subject to copyright. A typeface is not copyrightable though. When we've created marker graphics for wikipedia in SVG (vector) format, once we convert the type to paths, the work of the copyrightable software is done, leaving just shapes. It doesn't matter if I use Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator, the result has no more copyright claim to it in the final product.
I came across a thread on a board similar to this one that was more or less asking the same question that I did, and, apparently, someone looked at the metadata on the most recent copy of the FHWA Series Fonts manuals and deduced that the manual was actually using the Saa fonts all along, which I found surprising, since the Saa take on Series B doesn't look to be correct (at least compared to the Roadgeek fonts.)
I have Saa, which does appear to (mostly) conform to the 2000 spec. fonts, although it also has a Series A as well, which I believe was retired in 1961.
I think A was formally retired in 1968, but states kept using it for a while longer.
Looking at my PDF copy of the 2004 SHS book, the metadata says "SeriesB2000", "SeriesC2000", "SeriesD2000", "SeriesE2000", "SeriesModE2000" and "SeriesF2000".
Quote from: Dr Frankenstein on December 22, 2010, 12:00:57 PM
Looking at my PDF copy of the 2004 SHS book, the metadata says "SeriesB2000", "SeriesC2000", "SeriesD2000", "SeriesE2000", "SeriesModE2000" and "SeriesF2000".
When extracting those PDF images into Illustrator, though, the fonts are not embedded because it does a substitution. Do you know who actually makes those fonts in question?
Speaking of the SHS, the 2006 Michigan SHS mentions that Clearview fonts are used when appropriate and that Local Agency details are non-clearview for use only off-trunklines.
Quote from: Quillz on February 01, 2011, 03:59:29 AM
Quote from: Dr Frankenstein on December 22, 2010, 12:00:57 PM
Looking at my PDF copy of the 2004 SHS book, the metadata says "SeriesB2000", "SeriesC2000", "SeriesD2000", "SeriesE2000", "SeriesModE2000" and "SeriesF2000".
When extracting those PDF images into Illustrator, though, the fonts are not embedded because it does a substitution. Do you know who actually makes those fonts in question?
The fonts are probably embedded but only partially (incomplete character set).
I have no idea who made those.
Well, I was asking around on another board when I came into contact with someone who works for the Virginia DOT and they sent me a copy of the fonts they use for real signage and what not. The fonts are called "T2000DOTHWY[B-F]."
You can get them here: http://www.quillz.net/misc/DOT.zip - As these are actually being used by a DOT, I suppose they are about as "official" as you can get.
Comparing it to the popular Roadgeek fonts, they look near identical, as you'd probably expect, but the kerning is slightly different, and E(M) and F both have 6 and 9 numerals with pointier tips, much more pronounced than on the Roadgeek fonts.
Quote from: Quillz on February 03, 2011, 12:26:05 PM
Well, I was asking around on another board when I came into contact with someone who works for the Virginia DOT and they sent me a copy of the fonts they use for real signage and what not. The fonts are called "DOTHWY[B-F]."
You can get them here: http://www.quillz.net/misc/DOT.zip - As these are actually being used by a DOT, I suppose they are about as "official" as you can get.
Comparing it to the popular Roadgeek fonts, they look near identical, as you'd probably expect, but the kerning is slightly different, and E(M) and F both have 6 and 9 numerals with pointier tips, much more pronounced than on the Roadgeek fonts.
Dude, sweet! Thanks.
As I stated, these "official" fonts differ somewhat from the popular Roadgeek fonts, but comparing them to the fonts used in the SHS (2004) manual, they look to be virtually identical. Here's a closeup of the "9" used in Series E-F:
(https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fv45%2FNidoking%2Ff_shs.png&hash=f3c6a28012e9c11bcc72815513987339b47ee77e) (https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fv45%2FNidoking%2Ff_vdot.png&hash=585c8a550b9466027edbf84f3498f5dae3673bcb)
(https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fv45%2FNidoking%2Fem_shs.png&hash=5a9c73bbde603617e58a41cae8a7d3d67f6037a3) (https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fv45%2FNidoking%2Fem_dot.png&hash=ae5222ae4877e5adbea669f0c3d05ca9b0723bba)
(https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fv45%2FNidoking%2Fe_shs.png&hash=d8503b8961737455ac113f59c1fb6b8a448216f2) (https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fv45%2FNidoking%2Fe_vdot.png&hash=98b3f0dd2751d49673afd003fe12038184bf442e)
The SHS alphabets are on the left, the VDOT fonts are on the right. I've enlarged both as much as possible and they seem identical, although it's possible zooming in more might show some very slight deviations.
Quote from: Quillz on February 03, 2011, 12:26:05 PM
Well, I was asking around on another board when I came into contact with someone who works for the Virginia DOT and they sent me a copy of the fonts they use for real signage and what not. The fonts are called "DOTHWY[B-F]."
You can get them here: http://www.quillz.net/misc/DOT.zip - As these are actually being used by a DOT, I suppose they are about as "official" as you can get.
Comparing it to the popular Roadgeek fonts, they look near identical, as you'd probably expect, but the kerning is slightly different, and E(M) and F both have 6 and 9 numerals with pointier tips, much more pronounced than on the Roadgeek fonts.
Awesome! Thanks for that.
And here's a comparison between the VDOT fonts I was sent and the commonly used Roadgeek 2005 fonts. I used a Series C "240" and zoomed in about 4000% so you can see the very minor kerning and character design differences:
(https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fv45%2FNidoking%2FScreenshot2011-02-03at170633.png&hash=04946099a66b820cf4068fae96530755db2640e8) (https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fv45%2FNidoking%2FScreenshot2011-02-03at170704.png&hash=7f65a38a1ecdc509eb4dee7efb217f098a27a044) (https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fv45%2FNidoking%2FScreenshot2011-02-03at170646.png&hash=b1bf0f83a1564c7a4542778c5848ecf3d180e231)
The character parts outlined in gold are the Roadgeek fonts and the parts outlined in black are the VDOT fonts. As you can see, the creator of the Roadgeek fonts was incredibly accurate... At a standard 100% zoom, the eye simply cannot distinguish a difference between the two.
EDIT: Here's a much better comparison, at a zoom level much closer to normal:
(https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fv45%2FNidoking%2FScreenshot2011-02-03at171605.png&hash=6f047bb0547af0f67ed5bb3b11474b07a1500881)
The gray numbers are Roadgeek 2005 Series C, so the bits of white poking out from underneath show the slight differences in the VDOT font.
I'll have to keep using Roadgeek though, as this font set lacks diacritics.
Yes, it would appear it's not an expanded set for international use, which is what FHWA.org is selling. But considering it's used by Virginia, I can't really say I was expecting it to have a bunch of extra characters.
But I guess it's good to know how extremely accurate the Roadgeek fonts are, at least in regards to the FHWA Series. I know the Clearview clones aren't very accurate, and I'm not sure how it stacks up to the international fonts.
Quote from: Quillz on February 03, 2011, 12:26:05 PMComparing it to the popular Roadgeek fonts, they look near identical, as you'd probably expect, but the kerning is slightly different, and E(M) and F both have 6 and 9 numerals with pointier tips, much more pronounced than on the Roadgeek fonts.
I think that is probably a deliberate error, created for copyright verification. I have suspected SignCAD of doing the same with the "S" in Series D in one of the older versions of
SignCAD. (BTW, there are multiple versions of signcad.rsc floating around--I have come across several--and the incompatibilities are dismaying.)
BTW, I think the fonts received from the VDOT employee are probably the TrueType fonts packaged with
GuidSIGN, which is VDOT's standard traffic signing CAD package. The
MUTCD uses URW fonts.
Interesting. I've looked into it, and URW are the foundry that also released Saa, which I've used for quite a while because it included Series A. But it seems to be based on a standard older than 2000, as several numerals, especially the 8, do not seem to match the current SHS alphabet.
Since Virginia is now using a lot of Clearview, I'd expect them to come out with a knockoff pretty soon. ;-)
Wouldn't they just use the official fonts? Seems the makers of Clearview have no issues selling them to anyone, I just went on their website and bought them. I imagine they'd just sell them outright to the DOT, as well.
Almost all the knock-off are as good as the FHWA fonts, and yes there is a standard book showing these. I have two of them. There is no copywrite because they are in the public domain.
Also deathtopumpkins is right, there are so many variations used on "real" signs. Roadgeek 2005 fonts is fine. Most of the ones out there are so close to the 1972 imperial book, and the 1978 metric equivalent, you really can't tell the difference. I also have the 1961 edition which shows the now defunct "A" series letters.